Inaugural Symposia Panelists

Sciences, the Creative Instinct and the Liberal Arts

Gregory Petsko received a B.A. from Princeton University and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, which he attended on a Rhodes scholarship. His expertise lies in protein crystallography, including direct observation of transient species by low-temperature and Laue methods, protein dynamics and engineering, yeast genetics, the biology of the quiescent state of the eukaryotic cell, enzyme evolution and neurodegenerative diseases, especially Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He is past-president of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society.

ROBIN FEUER MILLER
Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities

Robin Feuer Miller earned a B.A. at Swarthmore College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. (with distinction) from Columbia University. Her scholarship focuses on the fiction of the 19th century, especially the work of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. Her most recent book, “Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey,” explores the tensions in Dostoevsky’s work between his journalism and his fiction and places him squarely within the tradition of the European novel. She has served as vice president of the International Dostoevsky Association since 1994 and sits on several editorial boards. She has received awards from the Whiting Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as a prize for “Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace,” a volume she co-edited. She also has appeared in documentaries on The History Channel and on the NPR radio programs “Against the Grain” and “What’s the Word?” She served as dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis from 1994 to 2000. During that time she initiated the interdisciplinary Consilience Seminars, a four-year project funded by Atlantic Philanthropies.

JOSEPH WARDWELL
Assistant Professor of Painting

Joseph Wardwell received a B.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Washington and an M.F.A. from Boston University. His work, which brings the worlds of rock and roll music and the history of painting together, has received acclaim in The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix. His artwork has been displayed in many galleries in Boston and New York, including the Museum of Fine Arts. In 2009 he curated the Rose Art Museum exhibition, “Master of Reality.”